A bombshell new survey has found that five metropolitan-area hospitals are among the most dangerous in the nation.
Of the 1,045 hospitals surveyed nationwide, Jacobi Medical Center in The Bronx was listed as the worst when it came to patient safety.
The medical center, run by the Health and Hospitals Corp., was a sickening 68 percent less safe than the average US health-care facility, according to Consumer Reports.
“New Yorkers often assume that they have access to some of the best health care in the world,” said Dr. John Santa, head of the magazine’s Health Ratings Center.
“And in some ways, they do, with many leading physicians and state-of-the-art facilities in the area. But our analysis suggests that, when it comes to patient safety, New Yorkers often receive substandard care.”
The survey included 81 hospitals in the area.
But another 17 local hospitals — including such major Manhattan facilities as Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Lenox Hill and the Hospital for Special Surgery — were not rated because the magazine could not get enough data.
Even the highest-rated hospital in the city, NYU, was still 10 percent below the national average.
Other top Manhattan hospitals did not do even that well.
New York-Presbyterian scored 18 percent below average, and Mount Sinai was 31 percent below.
Santa said one problem is most New York hospitals suffer from a culture of fear in which lower-ranking staffers, like nurses, are afraid to blow the whistle on doctors who make mistakes.
The situation is made worse when hospital administrators cater to the egos of their star doctors rather than forcing them to concentrate on basic safety measures, Santa said.
The solution is an attitude adjustment that starts at the top, he said.
“When it comes to safety and quality, the biggest single differentiator is a hospital CEO making it clear that safety is the No.1 priority,” Santa said.
The ratings were based on four key criteria:
* The prevalence of hospital-acquired infections.
* Readmissions: How many heart-attack, heart-failure and pneumonia patients have to be readmitted within 30 days.
* Whether patients were given clear instructions after their discharge.
* Whether patients were told the purpose of the drugs they were prescribed and any possible side effects that they might have.
A Jacobi spokeswoman argued that considering the staff’s ability to communicate is unfair because the hospital’s patients speak more than 150 languages.
She also argued that the hospital sees mostly poor patients, many of whom suffer from substance abuse or mental illness and are uninsured, homeless or live in shelters.
All of those factors compromise the ability to give follow-up care and increase the risk for readmissions, she said.
Santa, however, replied, “That’s no excuse for being unsafe.”
He noted that other hospitals that serve similar populations do better.
Meanwhile, the top-rated local hospital was St. Francis, in Roslyn, LI.
It scored 22 percent above the national average.
When hospitals refused to disclose data, the magazine used the most current information provided by the federal government and watchdog groups.